The purpose of this blog is to provide analytical commentary on formal and informal labour organisations and their attempts to resist ever more brutal forms of exploitation in today’s neo-liberal, global capitalism.

Monday, 12 September 2016

Towards Labour Centred Development

In
2014, Ben Selwyn published the book The Global Development Crisis(Polity, 2014), in which he critically
engages with market-led and state-led developmental models alike. Importantly,
he puts forward the novel concept of labour centred development. In this blog
post, I will discuss the main contributions of this remarkable book and explore
further the possibilities of labour centred development.

Challenging
state-led development

In
this highly accessible book, Selwyn makes three major contributions. First, he
asserts that it is the sphere of the capitalist social relations of production,
in which exploitation takes place and where the majority of the population,
workers having to sell their labour power, is subordinated to the minority,
capital that owns the means of production. Hence, even if the most brutal forms
of exploitation such as child labour were abolished, workers are still being
exploited in that the wage they are being paid is always less than the value of
the goods they produce, generated through their sale in the market (P.5). The
notion of a ‘fair wage for a fair day’s work’ makes simply no sense (see also Forget a ‘fair
wage for a fair day’s work’?).

Second,
there is general agreement on the left that liberal, market-led developmental
models not only do not work, but they are also highly exploitative for workers.
In order to ensure a free market, liberals advocate that it has to be easy for
employers to hire and fire workers and that production should not be hindered
by trade unions, ‘onerous’ health and safety regulations or legally established
minimum wages. State-led developmental models are, however, frequently
identified as progressive alternatives, ensuring potential developmental
catch-up, which is assumed to benefit workers in the end too. As Selwyn, by
contrast, makes clear in impressive conceptual and empirical clarity, state-led
development has generally been based on the extreme exploitation of labour.
Contemporary statist political economists’ (SPE)

‘admiration for
and advocacy of constructing strong, bureaucratically autonomous states that
are able to rationally and effectively generate and allocate resources cannot
hide the fact that these states are involved in overseeing and reproducing
highly exploitative labour regimes where workers are regarded as fuel for the
accumulation of capital. Contemporary SPE therefore … should not be viewed as
representing a progressive strategy for development’ (P.52).

Whether
List or Gerschenkron, both emphasised the important role of the state in late
development combined with the assumption that ‘workers needed to be manipulated
and disciplined by the state, and subject to a labour regime designed to
generate rapid productivity increases for capital’ (P.182). The widely praised
state-led development models in Asia including examples such as South Korea or
today China are clearly characteristic of these types of labour repression and
super-exploitation of workers. In short, state-led development is not a
progressive alternative.

Third,
it is the very notion of ‘labour centred development’, which opens up
progressive possibilities of thinking about development in novel ways. Whether
development is pushed by capital in the market-led developmental model or
whether development is pushed by the state in the state-led developmental
model, it is workers who are suffering. Hence, in order to obtain development
favourable to labour, this can only be the result of successful class struggle.
As Selwyn asserts, ‘the extent of labour-centred development depends on the
changing balance of class power’ (P.186). It is collective action by workers,
which will ultimately determine the extent of labour’s developmental potential.

The need to go
beyond the workplace

As
impressive as Selwyn’s book is, there are a number of shortcomings in my view.
First, Selwyn is aware of the fragmented nature of the working class and argues
that the labouring classes need to be broadly understood including also
informal workers. ‘The term “labour classes” includes urban/industrial workers
(“the working class” in traditional Marxian terminology), the “new middle
class” of white-collar workers and informal workers that populate the
ever-expanding “planet of slums”. The definition extends to some workers in the
rural sphere who are sometimes classified as “peasants” (in particular the
poorer peasants)’ (P.16). And yet, this is still to some extent a rather narrow
definition focusing on the work process, overlooking the sphere of social
reproduction, so essential to the reproduction of capitalism.

It
is Harry Cleaver’s notion of ‘social factory’, which allows us to go beyond
Selwyn’s definition of labour. Focusing on the ‘social factory’, i.e. the
workplace as well as the wider sphere of social reproduction, Cleaver was able to
take into account all the other forms of unwaged activities including child
rearing, education, which are necessary for the reproduction of capital, but
take place outside the workplace. Class and class struggle, as a result take a
very different and much broader meaning. ‘The identification of the leading
role of the unwaged in the struggles of the 1960s in Italy, and the extension
of the concept to the peasantry, provided a theoretical framework within which
the struggles of American and European students and housewives, the unemployed,
ethnic and racial minorities, and Third World peasants could all be grasped as
moments of an international cycle of working-class struggle’ (Cleaver 2000: 73). In short, a
new definition of ‘worker’ beyond the direct employee/employer relationship is
necessary in order to incorporate the whole ‘social factory’ of capitalism.

Equally,
in today’s time of environmental crisis, struggles over the destruction of the
environment also need to be incorporated into analyses of class struggle. Nothing
threatens labour centred development more than the continuation of capitalism’s
relentless exploitation of nature, the very biosphere of human existence.
Selwyn is silent in his book on the struggles over new nuclear energy power
stations, the exploitation of tar sands or a shift towards fracking. Again, the
book still exhibits too close a focus on the traditional work relations between
employers and workers, which overlooks the much broader dynamics of class
struggle.

Moreover,
Selwyn focuses almost exclusively on capitalism and, thereby, neglects the
possibilities of resistance emerging from non-capitalist spaces. Drawing on the
work of the Rethinking Marxism group in his article ‘The survival of
non-capitalism’, Chris Hesketh points out that ‘the overwhelming focus on
capitalism can lead quickly to a problem: the assumption of cultural life, and
all sites of socio-political activity are portrayed as being overwhelmed by,
subsumed into, the dynamics of capitalism’ (Hesketh, 2016: 5). While
non-capitalist space is simply understood as a passive object awaiting to be
subsumed in the further expansion of capitalism, the possibilities of
resistance, of labour centred development in Selwyn’s understanding, are not
captured. As Kiado Crus, a local activist in Oaxaca/Mexico points out, ‘in
Oaxaca we have thousands of hectares of communal land … This implies thousands
of hectares of resistance’ (Hesketh, 2016:
11).
In short, when looking for possibilities of labour centred development emerging
in processes of class struggle, resistance from non-capitalist space needs to
be taken into account as much as resistance from within the capitalist social
relations of production.

Finally,
although the concept of labour centred development holds great potential, the
actual examples provided by Selwyn are slightly disappointing. Grape growers in
Brazil, the MST or occupied factories in Argentina, these are all examples
which have already been extensively covered including by Selwyn himself. There
is little new here in the book.

Nevertheless,
these criticisms should not make us overlook the significance of Selwyn’s
contribution to thinking about development. Rather than providing concrete
examples of labour centred development, the book is a call to us to carry out
further research in theory and practical activities to contribute to a labour
centred development. The task remains clear. In the words of Selwyn, ‘the
struggle against exploitation takes myriad forms and has many outcomes. The
challenge of a labour-centred development is to conceptually connect these
struggles and their potential outcomes to a vision of human development free
from exploitation’ (P.208).